by Mike Carey
‘Let go of my hand, Castor.’
‘Then tell me you’re not going to go and bust Doug Hunter out of jail.’
‘I’ll do what I think is best.’
Juliet was still staring at me. I did my best to lock onto those midnight-black eyes without falling into them and collapsing in a heap on the floor.
‘I can’t let you,’ I said simply. ‘Listen, when we met for the first time, when you seduced me and almost swallowed me whole, I was – imprinted. I heard you, as a tune. I can’t forget that music now, because I hear it every fucking day, whether you’re with me or not. If you set Myriam Kale free, more people are going to die the way Barnard died – and it’s a squalid, horrible way to die. I’m not going to let that happen. I’ll play you out, Juliet. I’ll do it. I’ll exorcise you.’
She didn’t answer. For a moment we just stood, my hand holding her wrist across the table, a frozen tableau.
Then she snatched her hand free, brought it up and around almost faster than I could see it, and slapped me hard across the face.
Actually, hard isn’t an adequate word. I felt the impact and then heard the sound. The impact was something like crashing through your windscreen at fifty and hitting a brick wall – except that since it was the wall rather than me that was moving I went pinwheeling backwards through the air. The sound was like a gunshot – sharp and clear and very, very loud.
Nothing else was clear, though. Suddenly, for no very good reason that my dazed mind could grab hold of, I was on my back in the wreckage of someone else’s table, splinters of wood and porcelain still falling in slow motion through the still air, and a ringing in my ears like a million Munchkins celebrating the demise of the Wicked Witch.
Then, equally abruptly, I was yanked to my feet again, and Juliet was holding me, one-handed, up close to her own lithe, unyielding body. It was somewhere I often fantasised about being, but the agonising pain in my back and shoulders and the vice-like grip of her fingers around my throat took an awful lot of the fun out of it.
‘You’ll have to bind me before you can break me,’ she said. ‘Let’s see who’s quicker, Castor. Because I’ll hear the first note of that tune, however far away you are when you play it, and I’ll rip your throat out before you get to the second.’
This time the silence all around us was real: everyone frozen in unnatural, off balance postures as though terrified of attracting Juliet’s attention by a sound or a movement. I struggled to speak and managed to choke out a few words.
‘We – going Dutch – this time?’
With a wince of disgust she let me drop. My legs wouldn’t hold me so I fell in a heap on the floor. Through eyes canted at ninety degrees to the vertical I saw her turn and stalk out of the café. Then, after a few seconds more of just enjoying the luxury of breathing, I rolled over onto my hands and knees and picked myself up. For a second I thought I was going to black out: the wound in my shoulder, given to me by the loup-garou at the Nexus lab, felt as though it had been torn open when I fell, and the whole of my right side was on fire.
Nobody approached me: they just watched, expectantly, with the rapt anticipation of people who’ve just called the cops and are keen to see what happens when they arrive. I threw down a couple of twenties for the meal, nodded my thanks to the waitress and limped out of the door.
The Cobalt made it all the way back to Birmingham, raising sparks from the asphalt for the last ten miles or so: I was amazed not to be pulled over on the way, but by the time I climbed out of the car in the airport car park I’d realised why that was. Juliet sucks in people’s gazes and holds them so completely that nobody in the Golden Coffee House had registered me at all. When the cops had finally arrived and taken statements, I was willing to bet that most of the descriptions had included some variation on ‘just this guy’.
There was paperwork to be filled in on the car, but surprisingly few recriminations. I invented a story about a collision with a concrete bollard: the clerk at the counter transcribed it faithfully and made me sign it. There was an excess of a hundred dollars, which I paid without a murmur. It seemed like the least I could do.
Then I was sitting in the departure lounge again, waiting for the next plane to Heathrow while the huge bruise on the right side of my face spread and deepened. I found myself wondering how Juliet was going to get back: I was pretty damn sure that she wouldn’t leave the ground, anyway, but I had no idea what she’d do instead. Or whether it would be faster or slower than a transatlantic flight.
By the time I landed at Heathrow I was thinking straight again, so the first thing I did was to get to a phone and make the call I should have made from the States. It didn’t do me a lot of good, though: at Pentonville the highest I could get up the chain of command was the night duty officer, and something in his tone told me that he wasn’t taking me seriously.
‘A woman?’ he kept on repeating, every time I let him get a word in edgeways.
‘No,’ I repeated, with the brittle, strained patience you keep in reserve until you need it to deal with morons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. ‘She looks like a woman. But she’s actually a demon. A succubus.’
‘A demon. Right.’ I was getting the same strained patience bouncing right back at me, and I wasn’t enjoying it much. ‘And who’s she coming to visit, again?’
‘Doug Hunter. Only if she comes, it won’t be to visit him. It’ll be to break him out.’
‘Well, thanks for that little tip-off, sir. I’m sure we’ll keep a lookout for her.’
‘You’ll need to put up some wards,’ I said, persisting without much hope. ‘On the tops of the walls, as well as on the doors, because she doesn’t have to use a door. And it’s probably a good idea to have a priest handy, if you’ve got one on-staff. He can draw a line in holy water around the cell block, or bless the—’
‘We’ll keep a lookout for her,’ the duty officer repeated, and hung up.
I swore bitterly at the innocent phone receiver in my hand.
‘Have a good trip, Castor?’
I turned in time to have a heavy briefcase shoved brusquely into my arms – and into my stomach. Winded, I stared into the cold, hard glare of Nicky Heath: I took hold of the briefcase as he let go of it. Nicky examined my swollen, discoloured face with something like satisfaction. He had a rolled-up newspaper in his hand, and he used it to point at my bruised cheek.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I can see you had a bad one. Great! I’m really happy the suffering is being spread around. Where’s the lap-dancer from Hell?’
‘Flying under her own steam. Why? You got something for us, Nicky?’
The glare shot up the emotional register towards the hysterical.
‘Yeah, Castor, and what I got is a fucking newsflash. You did it to me again, you bastard. Pulled me into your stupid grandstanding shit so people are knocking on my door because they want to cut pieces out of you. So this is the parting of the fucking ways. I just came over here to sign off on the job and tell you not to fucking bother to write.’
I stared at him in numb perplexity. I was running on empty, and I didn’t want to have to work out the translation for myself.
‘Someone tried to lean on you?’ I asked.
‘Someone tried to torch me. That someone is now dog meat. But they know where I live, so presumably someone is gonna send someone else to finish the fucking job.’
There was something surreal about the scene. Nicky was keeping his voice level and conversational so that people wouldn’t look around and try to tune in to the conversation, but his teeth were bared in a snarl and his pale, waxen face looked like the mask of an angry ghost in a Noh play.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘It’s starting to look as though the opposition is a bit better organised than I was expecting. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’
‘Yeah?’ Nicky smiled grimly. ‘Well, save some of that sorry for when you hear the rest of the story, Castor. Get us a cab. I’ll ride back into town with you and tell you what I got. After
that you’re on your lonesome fucking own.’
I raided a cashpoint machine, scraping the bottom of the hollow barrel that was my bank account. It was getting on for midnight, but there were a few taxis in the rank and one of them crawled towards us as we came out from the terminal onto the pick-up bay. Nicky looked at the driver, eyes narrowed, and his hand thumped into my chest as I stepped forward.
‘Not that one.’
‘What? Why?’
The taxi driver, a burly guy with way too much hair on his arms, was looking at us expectantly.
‘Roll on, motherfucker,’ Nicky told him.
The cabbie’s face went blank with surprise and then livid.
‘Why, you fucking piece of—’
He started to open his door, but a middle-aged couple came out of the terminal behind us, walked right past us and got into the cab: the door closed again, and the cab rolled away, the driver shooting us a look of frustrated venom.
‘Nicky,’ I said, ‘if you’re going to pick fights with guys who are bigger than me, could you give me at least a couple of seconds’ warning?’
‘First cab could be a plant,’ he said. ‘Second, too.’ He was already walking past the next cab in line as he spoke, and now he pulled open the door of the third.
‘You’ve got to go from the front of the-’ the driver began.
‘Just drive,’ Nicky snapped. ‘I’m not paying you to fucking talk at me.’
Nicky skootched over and I climbed in beside him, putting the briefcase at my feet. This driver was – fortunately – older and less solidly built than the first. His balding head, wispy hair clinging in loose tufts around his ears, and his bulbous nose made him look like a moonlighting circus clown. He turned a solemn gaze on Nicky, then on me, weighed dignity against discretion and went for the easy option. We pulled away while the cabbie in front of us in the rank leaned on his horn in futile protest.
‘Where to?’ our driver demanded.
‘Walthamstow,’ Nicky said. ‘Top end of Hoe Street. And turn your radio on.’
The driver leaned forward. Tinny country and western music filled the cab.
‘Louder,’ Nicky said. ‘All the way up.’
I’ve got to know Nicky’s moods pretty well over the years, so the paranoia came as no surprise. His coming out here to meet me, in spite of the fact that he saw me as the source of his troubles, was more revealing: something heavy would have been needed to counterbalance his spectacularly overdeveloped survival instincts. The only thing I knew that was heavy enough was his spectacularly overdeveloped ego. He wanted – really wanted – to tell me what he’d found.
‘So go ahead,’ I invited him, as plunky guitar noises echoed around our ears.
‘Make your day?’
‘If you think you can, Nicky, yeah. Make my day. It’s going to be a pretty tall order, though.’
‘Well, how’s this for starters?’ He threw the newspaper in my lap: The Sun. With the pressure of his hands removed it started to unroll. I smoothed it out and read the headline. PREMIER MANAGER IN BUNGS SCANDAL. Okay, that was the sports page. I flipped it over.
TWO DIE IN M1 INFERNO.
And a photo – an old photo, too flattering by about thirty pounds – of Gary Coldwood.
‘Oh Jesus!’ I muttered.
‘Guy was a friend of yours, wasn’t he, Castor? And it seemed like only yesterday he was promising you “something juicy”. I’m assuming that was work-related rather than some freaky outcrop of your love life. Then he jumps the barrier on the M1 northbound at one in the morning and hits a car coming the other way. Hundred-and-forty-mile-an-hour collision. Boom. Smoking spark plugs come down half a mile away. Two people in the other car, mother and ten-year-old daughter, both dead. Coldwood hauled out of the wreckage with both legs broken, stinking of booze. Funny how things work out.’
I couldn’t answer. I was still staring at the photo. Coldwood was wearing an expression I’d seen on his face at least a hundred times: a tough-guy cockiness that he copied from John Woo movies and never managed to get more than half right. He really wanted to be the scourge of evildoers. If he could have got away with wearing a cape and mask to work, he would have done it.
Nicky was still talking. ‘I checked this stuff out afterwards, you understand. After I got broken into in the middle of the fucking night. Two guys, both carrying guns with no serial numbers on them. No ID, no pack drill. Deadfall trap got one of them, and the other died when I routed the mains power through the lock he was trying to pick to get in to me. Coincidence? I asked myself. Old friends getting nostalgic? My fucking batshit family, coming in for another pass? But no. After five minutes on the internet I turn up this Coldwood thing, and then I know it’s you.’
‘Nicky-’ I didn’t even know what I was going to say. There was a tight, wound-up feeling in my chest that felt like it was climbing upwards. This was my fault. John Gittings and Vince Chesney counted as negligent homicide, but this was worse, somehow. I’d pushed Gary into the line of fire and then I’d ducked.
‘So now I’m interested,’ Nicky was saying. ‘Hey, pal, you want to turn that radio up? It’s not reaching us in the back here. So now I’m looking for patterns. The first one I find is that Coldwood wasn’t the only stubborn stain that got wiped out on this pass.’
‘There was someone else in the car with him?’
‘Nope. But there were some other cops dying that night and they were friends of his. A detective constable and a forensics guy named Marchioness. What kind of a name is that for a guy to wear? One of them jumped out of a window, the other was pushed in front of a train. Busy night for the reaper, last night was. Unsociable hours, the whole fucking deal. He should talk to his union.’
I turned to Nicky to tell him to get to the fucking point, but the dry black pebbles of his eyes met my stare with implacable calm.
‘One more and then I’m done. You ever hear of a guy named Stuart Langley?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘He’s a ghostbreaker. Works out of Docklands.’ I suddenly remembered the story that Lou Beddows had told me on the day of John’s funeral: the late-night call, the ambush, and the beating. He lasted for a week, and then they turned the machine off . . .
‘He was working with John,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t he?’
‘I don’t know, Castor. J the G was going all around the houses looking for a partner to work his big case with him, so sure, maybe Stu Langley said yes. It might help to explain this other weird coincidence.’
‘What other-?’
‘The mother and daughter. In the car that hit Coldwood. Elspeth Langley, and little Niamh Langley. Does it strike you that there’s a pattern emerging here? I know I tend to see patterns where there aren’t any: that’s what paranoia is all about, right? But in any case I trust I’ve set the scene for the big fucking revelations I’m about to lay on you?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, the tightness coiling in my throat now. ‘You’ve set the scene.’
‘Right. Well, you asked me to try to squeeze some sense out of the sleeve notes in John-boy’s A to Z . . .’
It wasn’t what I was expecting. ‘We’re kind of past that,’ I reminded him curtly. ‘The latest thing I asked you to do was to find out where the bodies were buried.’
Nicky nodded, a little impatiently. ‘Yeah, and I put the feelers out. Nothing, at first. A lot of nothing, because I put out a lot of feelers. So I went back to square one.’
‘The lists in John’s notebook.’
‘Exactly. But this time I applied some fuzzy logic. Because it seemed to me that the key word was gonna be the one at the very end. After all, that’s where Gittings finished up. If he was trying to solve a puzzle, then there’s a good chance that last word was the answer: the output for all that fucking crazy input.’
I thought back to the lists in the A to Z: the pages and pages of clotted scribble, annotated and underlined almost to critical mass.
‘The last word was smashna,’ I said.
‘
Yeah,’ said Nicky. ‘Except it wasn’t. John couldn’t spell worth a flying fuck in English, and this wasn’t English. So I fed it through some online translators, and I found the word he was really looking for.’ He looked at me, signalling that the punchline was coming and that he didn’t want to miss any detail of my reaction when I heard it. ‘It wasn’t smashna – sweet, cool, great, fabuloso. It was smashana – the Hindi word for a cremation ground.’
Obvious. So fucking obvious. Not the word, which I’d never heard before, but the pay-off. Not a cemetery at all: he tried the cemeteries and crossed them out one by one until he got to the truth. I smacked my forehead. It was a bad move, though, because it sent needles of pure agony through my bruised face and jarred neck.
‘Thus forearmed,’ Nicky said, exuding grim smugness, ‘I narrowed my search fields and got much better results. All but a few of the bad-ass dearly departed boys on Gittings’s list –’
‘– were cremated,’ I finished.
Nicky trumped my ace. ‘Were cremated in the same fucking place. Mount Grace. It’s a private crematorium in East London. But you already know that, don’t you, Fix? Because it’s where John the Git was relocated to when Carla decided to make light of grave matters.’
Mount Grace. Yeah, it all fitted – at least, up to a point. ‘But then why would John . . . ?’ I demanded, then I trailed off into silence. That wasn’t the right question. We had at least two people verifiably risen from the dead. Les Lathwell’s fingerprints on that bullet suggested that he’d returned in his own flesh, because he’d still had his own fingers: but Myriam Kale had possessed someone else’s body, theoretically impossible though that was. Maybe John had been taken over too. Maybe the weird things he’d done in the last weeks of his life had just been preparing the ground so that his suicide, when it came, would be taken at face value.
Or maybe I was being too subtle. Maybe John had finished his investigation by going native: switching horses in the middle of the River Styx. I could sort of see how that would work. If there was a gateway to immortality just off the Mile End Road, and if I knew exactly where it was, I might be tempted to stand in line and take my chances.